Tech Won't Save Us - How Algorithms Are Transforming Work w/ Callum Cant

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Callum Cant to discuss the UK Supreme Court ruling that Uber drivers are workers, his experience organizing as a Deliveroo worker, and how algorithmic management is transforming work.Callum Cant is the author of “Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy.” He’s also the head of communications at Momentum and an editor at Notes from Below. Follow Callum on Twitter as @CallumCant1.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:The UK Supreme Court ruled that Uber drivers are not self-employed. It’s a win for workers.In 1976, workers at Lucas Aerospace produced the Alternative Corporate Plan, otherwise known as the Lucas Plan, that reimagined how production could be used to address social needs.Thinkers mentioned: Stan Weir, Romano Alquati, Eric Blanc’s “Red State Revolt,” E.P Thompson.Support the show

Algorithmic management is not just a phenomena of the gig economy or a phenomena of platform capitalism. This is a new innovation in management technology that is going to spread everywhere. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Callum Kent. Callum is the author of Writing for Deliveroo, Resistance in the New Economy. He's also the head of communications at Momentum and an editor at Notes from Below. Callum is one of the people who's been on my list of guests who I wanted to have on the show from the very beginning. So I'm really happy that I was finally able to have him on and we could chat about his fascinating book and the other work that he's been doing about how work has been changing in the service economy and what that means for the workers who are doing that work. If you liked last week's episode with Gavin Mueller, I think you're really going to like this one too, because we dig into the recent ruling by the UK Supreme Court that Uber drivers are workers,

not self-employed, and what that might mean in the future. But also Callum's experience working for Deliveroo, one of the food delivery companies that are active in the gig economy in the UK, and how he took part in the organizing by those drivers to push back against the company and improve their working conditions. But we also touch on the effect of automation and algorithmic management on the larger service economy from gig economy work to call centers, and how that not only reduces workers' knowledge of the production process, but also degrades the standards of their work, the pay that they can expect to receive, and how people think about the work and the value of

the work that they're doing. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And if you want to find out more about the other shows in the network, you can go to harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like the show, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it on social media or with any friends Thank you so much and enjoy the conversation. Callum, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. It's great to speak with you. Obviously, you wrote this fantastic book called Riding for Deliveroo that looks at the experience of delivery workers in the UK. And so I'm really excited to talk to you about that today and kind of dig into what's been going on over there.

But to get started, a lot of the listeners to the podcast might not be familiar with, you know, what has been going on in the UK and the extent of gig economy work that takes place over there. So just to kind of orient us, can you give us an idea of how prevalent gig work is in the UK? And were gig companies just kind of allowed to roll in, like in the US? Or was there any regulatory or government pushback when these companies kind of started launching over there? Our best estimates at the moment is that about 7% of UK adults in the workforce are engaged in full-time gig work, right? Now that runs the gamma, everything from Uber and Deliveroo to, you know, cleaning on platforms,

the whole range of services. Now, we found it, and I think this is a transnational trend, really difficult to get good numbers. There was certainly some period early on in 2016, 2017, when I was just getting into the research of this stuff, you would get wildly different numbers as to the proportion of the working population. So it's never been particularly clear. What we can say is that a company like Deliveroo, you're looking at about 15,000 food couriers working for them. A company like Uber, obviously, very, very large in the UK, London is one of the only profitable markets, you're talking more about

60,000 workers. So these are, you know, a decent sized airport is about 20,000 people just for context. So these are very large workplaces. They entered the market mostly, we have some homegrown competitors, Deliveroo being one of them, which sprung up in London, mostly around 2015, 2016. As with the American economy, there wasn't really any control over the expansion of these people. We've got a very deregulatory hands-off state that doesn't really have the mechanisms or the will to enforce any kind of labor market regulation on many of these new actors. So you had them enter the market, expand very rapidly. And then the initial kind of wave of struggles back and forth for control, both between the state and also workers and capital, occurred around that 2016-17 mark.

So you had some initial confrontations between, you know, we have kind of decentralized governments and in like major cities. So we have the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who is a very wet Labour politician, kind of meant to be of the left, but not really that left. But he did kind of, you know, try and confront Uber at one stage, which led to a certain back and forth over the licensing of Ubers as taxis. And there were also worker protests, which is where I start the book. We had a really rapid growth and commensurate with that rapid growth, we had a rapid expansion of worker self-organization and struggle that really came to light, particularly in food platforms over the first couple of years. We're talking 16, 17, 18. out really well for us. And what you talk about in London, I feel like we've seen a few times there've been these stories about TFL kind of saying that Uber would potentially be pushed out of the city, not able to operate. And then it seemed like at the last minute, that would constantly be rollback and Uber would be allowed to remain. And obviously, part of the reason that I wanted to talk to you today is there was this court case at the UK Supreme Court that found that Uber drivers who

had sued the company would be recognized as workers instead of as self-employed people. And so I was hoping that you could kind of, before we dig into kind of this history that you lay out in the book and what has been happening in the past few years, do you think that this court case will change things significantly in the UK for gig workers? Because there's been talk, you know, some people have said like this could be a really kind of defining ruling, whereas other people have said that this will only apply to these drivers who had sued them in this case and that it might be difficult to kind of expand it beyond them. And I guess, can you also explain in the UK what the difference would be between a self-employed worker, a worker and an employee? Because I think that's a little bit different than in the US. So this case actually began way back in 2015, right when the platform was in its infancy. That's when the case started going through court. And this latest judgment was

appealed by Uber because this finding was kind of found beforehand to the Supreme Court. And so the Supreme Court of the UK has made its judgment now. So it's taken six years to get from the first case to now, which I think tells you something about how quick the state is to act in this kind of labour market regulation sphere. So in the UK, we tend to have two dominant categories, self-employment and employment. Particularly after 2008, there's been a massive expansion of self-employment in the UK. And that doesn't just mean, you know, things that are actually self employed, that often means, you know, for instance, the construction trade in the UK is largely filled with self employed labour. Now, obviously, people are employed by, you know, whatever company is putting up the building, if they're doing framework, they're employed by a framework company.

But there is this kind of like legal pretension, that actually, they are doing framework, they're employed by a framework company. But there is this kind of like legal pretension that actually they are self-employed independent contractors who are just happening to be contracted for this particular building. And that kind of bogus self-employment isn't new. It isn't a particular gig economy thing. I mean, in the book, I talk about how with the building trade, it kind of emerged out of the 1970s in the UK. But there is a lot of bogus self-employment. And that makes up a large portion of the labor market. Then you also have kind of classical employment, which is the employment relation as it kind of arose out for the post 45 period with, you know, all the protections,

however inadequate they might be in terms of sick pay, holiday pay, etc. And that's the kind of more formalized relationship, the company that employs you pays a tax called national insurance to cover the costs of all the statutory provisions. And it's the condensation of hundreds of years of struggle between capital and labor into a particular regulatory format. Now, this third category of worker is actually, it's kind of only really been brought to prominence by this case. It was, I believe, originally used only in some very minor forms of like legal clerking. It isn't like a major thing. You won't hear lots of people talking about worker status in the UK. And it was kind of largely obscure until dug up and used extensively in this case.

And so we don't really know what its application means. And this is one of the very interesting things, right? So in other contexts, like if you think about the Prop 22 example in California, right? So this is where Uber got really involved in basically changing the state's labor laws through a referendum in order to create a third category that's kind of halfway between self-employed and employed. Now, they kind of cut that out of whole cloth. They invented a new third category. In the UK, it wasn't Uber that was fighting for this third category. It was actually the workers themselves. And the third category kind of already existed, albeit in a niche application.

So it's still a bit confused. What it means for the workers involved, the 35, is that they'll get minimum wage or be entitled to national minimum wage in the UK and holiday and sick pay. Now, statutory holiday and sick pay is really nothing. I think you get £95 a week if you're off sick, which is not enough to cover anything. But they are entitled to those benefits. And then the struggle really becomes, what does that mean? Because we're still really trying to work that out. People who say this is only going to impact the 35 drivers involved, yes, this case only concerns them. But the other 60,000 drivers have a car style precedent. So it seems impossible to think that there will not be

some attempt to expand that, whether that be a big class action suit or whether that be an attempt to force them to change their terms. For instance, we could be looking at HMRC, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, which is our kind of enforcement body, could be looking at minimum wage enforcement against Uber because all of these drivers now very clearly should be being paid minimum wage. But we're not sure what it's going to mean. What they really found, what the justices found, was that there was a position of subordination, right? The case hinged on whether algorithmic management, which is something Labour scholars have kind of coined to talk about the way that platforms manage workers, is that really management in the legal sense? And what they found is that, yes, this is management in the legal sense

in that it's not an equal relationship between contractor and contractor, the relationship between Uber and driver. It's a relationship of subordination, right? It's like the employer-employee relationship. So they've expanded this third category massively. The implications are still going to be very hard to see. It could spread across the labor market. We've never really operated on the assumption this third category is going to be large and

extensive. So it'll be very interesting to see there's potential here, I think, in both directions, both for gig workers to claim this third status as an advance and to move in a kind of more positive direction for them, but then also for kind of the uberification of labor conditions in other parts of the economy, right? There could be a leveling down as well as a leveling up here. So, you know, I'm not a legal scholar. A lot remains to be seen. And ultimately, I'm so much of a vulgar Marxist that I really think one of the major determining factors here is going to be the organisation of class forces, right? You know, how well organised are workers and how well organised are capital? Because, you know, as Marx says, between equal right force decides.

Yeah, I think what you lay out there is that it looks like, you know, in the UK, there's going to be this fight over a third category in the way that it looks like that is starting to play out in the United States, right? Now, in the United States, it's more the workers who are fighting against this third category, because it has been constructed by the companies to work in their interest, whereas it seems in the UK, you know, the drivers have kind of tried to claim this third category as something that would actually work for them. So that seems a little bit different. But in the US, we're already seeing companies that are not, you know, Uber, Lyft, or these gig companies start to reclassify workers because of the decision of Prop 22, right know, I think makes up a really important piece of your book, right? You talk about how, you know, in 2017, Deliveroo introduced a new in a way, because of the way that it actually worked and because of the way that it further denied drivers any kind of relationship to management or ability to push back in a serious way to any kind of person, right? So what effects does this algorithmic management have on the riders and the work that they do? For me, I think the best way to understand this is go back to Taylorism. Now, Taylorism is one of the major doctrines of workplace control, labor process design come up with by the bosses in 20th century America. And what Taylor did was

he went and he observed loads of steel factories, he observed railway works, he observed all kinds of different workplaces. And basically, what he discovered, or what he saw as one of the major problems of management was that workers understand the labor process very intuitively, right? Like, because they're doing it all day, workers are expert in the labor process. And they understand where kind of the dead time is, where you can get away with sabotaging things, where you can get away with not working very hard. So they can really control their intensity, right? Because they have this surplus of knowledge about how the labor process is organized. So as a boss, you can say go faster, but you may not be able to see precisely where the, you know, the breaks are being taken. So he talks about this as soldering, right? You know, it's wasting time on the job.

And his major fixation and the fixation of a lot of American capital in those kind of industrialized contexts was like, how can we increase the intensity with which labor power is expended on the job? Because fundamentally, you know, it's what I call the indeterminacy contradiction, right? Your labor power, when you're hired by an employer is bought as potential. It's not a realized thing, right? And there's always the capacity for refusal. There's always the capacity to say, no, I won't do this. No, I'm going to work slower. No, I'm not going to apply myself at 100% efficiency. And compare different commodities. So you think about, say, your McDonald's. The potatoes are not going to refuse to be potatoes, right? The potatoes aren't going to be, they're going to do what they do. But the human workers, depending on how they're managed,

you can get different degrees of efficiency out of them, right? So one of the major trends that has always defined, you know, how capitalist approaches a workplace is how do I increase the efficiency with which labour power is applied? Now, in the 20th century context, Taylorism, this always began from the premise that actually the worker understands the labour process better than me. I need to study the labour process. I need to try and get some of their understanding so that I can then force them to work harder, right? Now, the thing I find fascinating about algorithmic management is this is kind of inverted, right? Actually, the worker doesn't really understand many of the elements of their own labor process. Because with algorithmic

management, you are basically working to the instructions of an app. It will ping you instruction, instruction, instruction, instruction. They're very brutal. This is where I think it's kind of really authoritarian. It is like, go here, do this, do that. And you don't understand the processes of computation, the processes of organization that go on below the surface, right? This is why we talk about these apps as kind of black boxes, because the internal processes

that actually structure the labor process are controlled by a layer of workers, tech workers, who you as a worker on the street don't necessarily know anything about. You know, if someone described to me how the algorithms within Deliveroo's app works, I could not tell you for the life of me, right? You know, it's kind of like, I think it's called a traveling salesman problem, right? Where you have a number of different points. I kind of understand that. It's a logistical problem solver. But beyond that, I could not tell you a thing. So this is one of the really interesting things. The worker subjected to algorithmic management is given instructions, very brutal instructions with no capacity for flexibility or moderation. So there isn't that

classical, you know, the relationship with the human supervisor. If you think about that, I've done shitty jobs before. And usually the relationship, the human supervisor, you can kind of say, oh, you know, I don't want to do it that way. I'm really tired. Can I have five minutes? You can kind of push back. And especially if you're being worked really hard, you can push back quite firmly. And many human supervisors, apart from the real bastards, of course, will kind of struggle to maximize the work that you're doing. But with the algorithm, there's none of that give and take. You're just giving instructions that you don't understand how they're being generated, and you're just told to do X, Y, Z. And that can be quite interesting subjectively, I think, because people struggle to do things that they don't understand. And that's why one of the really reoccurring things I found working for Deliveroo was that over and over again, riders, when we were chatting together, people would come up with theories of the app. They'd kind of try and reverse engineer, how does this work out of what I've come up with in my head? And then maybe I'm just going to make a fair bit of it up and then come out with this really convincing sounding thing for this is how the app works. I met riders who used to say,

oh yes, every restaurant sends out a ping every five seconds and it registers everyone within a certain... That may well be true. I don't know. It's intellectual property that I don't have access to. But workers really wanted to theorize this because they sense that lack of control. So algorithmic management, it liquidates that capacity for accommodation in the process of management. It attempts to intensify things massively. It concentrates knowledge in the hand of a layer of workers who aren't on the front lines of doing the work, and therefore can produce really antagonistic conditions where actually being managed by an app there is none of that kind of human relationship that might prevent you from just being like you know fuck this i really don't like this work i want to go on strike there's also none of the supervisory element that would

stop you for instance organizing so it was funny when we worked for delivery in brighton the story of the book is basically about me working for this company, organizing some strikes and stuff, and how we as a workforce attempted to improve our conditions. Now, when we were organizing, we found incredibly easy to do so because the app always requires a kind of a liquid labor supply. It needs more or less labor at any one time, depending on the volume of orders. So it would kind of congregate you in these central public spaces, and you'd be near all the restaurants. And then when it needed you, it'd call you out from there. So it would almost have you in like a holding pool at these places called zone centers. Now, obviously, if you're not doing very much work, and there aren't

a lot of orders available, and your earnings aren't very good, you're going to spend more time in the holding pool. Now, if you fill a holding pool with 30, 40 riders, all of whom have done like one order in the last hour, so they've earned four pounds, which is half the minimum wage here, they're getting freezing cold. They're really annoyed. They want to be making more money. They need to be making more money to support their families. And you just leave them there with no supervision. They're going to talk about forming a union. I can guarantee you those things turned into like massive, basically open meetings at points where, you know, there were some remarkable occasions where like, bystanders would hear us talking about strike action, intervene to encourage us to go on strike. It was this really dynamic kind of forum for workers. And that's another thing that

algorithm management can't deal with. Because I guarantee, you know, I've worked in kitchens, if you in a kitchen, start talking about forming a union within earshot of your boss, you're not going to be working in the kitchen very much longer, right? But that's when they've automated management. They've not automated that supervisory function, right? They've got the coordination, but not the supervision. So I think arrogant management is a fascinating phenomenon. It really defines how labor is being reorganized in this sector.

And it's also an expanding phenomenon. It's not one that's just going to be limited to, say, you know, Uber or whatever, right? So as part of my doctoral research, I was doing some work with workers at a pub chain here, Weatherspoons. So Weatherspoons is characterized by having incredibly cheap food options as part of their offering. So they have these almost like fast food kitchens stuck in a pub that just churns out loads of burgers and all that kind of stuff. Now, one of the really interesting developments was that whilst I was observing, they started to introduce an iOrder system so you could order on your phone. I don't know if pubs and bars work

in quite the same way. I think they probably do. But basically for us, you queue to the bar and the role of the bartender is to remember in their head this kind of invisible queue of who arrived when and then pick them out in order, right so that person who is the the arbitrator of the invisible queue the bartender they have kind of a control on the rate that orders can come in whereas actually this i order system overrode that and then meant that you weren't limited by how many bar staff that were available as to how many orders could be taken orders could be put in that way and then they go straight to the kitchen where they had a big display up where ping ping ping, ping, in would come all these orders, right? And they'd have a 10 minute timer on them and no real limitation on how many could come in at one time. So these workers

had gone from the classical working pattern where they get given tickets, they take the ticket, they work out what's on it, they put it on the thing, they fire it, a normal way of working the kitchen. Suddenly they had these massive boards across the kitchen telling them, you've got to deliver this in five minutes. Go, go, go. Now that change produced a change in the way that they worked. And that's algorithmic management, right? That coordination of orders is part of the same trend that's defining work at Deliveroo and Uber. So I think we've got to view this as this is not just a phenomena of the gig economy or a phenomena of platform capitalism. This is a new innovation in management technology that is going to spread everywhere it's in amazon

distribution centers you know they have patents for goggles that you put on which give you directions left right forward up down etc to actually guide the hand of the individual as they're going around the distribution center this kind of technology is coming to work. And its only goal is to increase work intensification. But in doing so, it also gets rid of some of that accommodation, it gets rid of some of that supervision, and it creates quite an antagonistic relationship that I think for people who are interested in organizing at work, who are interested in finding sources of power in the workplace, the antagonistic conditions generated by algorithmic management should be of real interest to us. Absolutely. I think that's fascinating. And what you say about

the workers wanting to understand how these algorithms actually work, it just feels completely natural, right? Going back, as you say, the workers were usually the ones who knew how the production processes worked. And it was Taylorism that was really designed to kind of take that power back from the workers and give it to management. Well, I mean, there's some really interesting stuff here, but that kind of worked, right? It kind of did. But there's also, if you go and look at the Johnson Forest tendency, who are this slightly obscure Marxist tendency in the US in the 50s and 60s, they did a lot of accounts of work from the worker's perspective, right? Where they would get people to write about what it was like to, they were often based in Detroit. So in car factories, right? What was automotive

manufacture like for the person working on the assembly line? A lot of these accounts kind of describe workers who would take breaks and walk out of their section deliberately to go and see how the whole factory fit together. So they wanted to go and discover how it all worked together, because I think human beings are by, maybe I don't want to say our nature, I'm too much cautious about humanism, too concerned about that. But there is a desire that emerges out of many organisations of work where people want to see how their own individual contribution fits into a larger pattern of cooperation. And so there is always going to be a drive, I think, from below to understand the workplace. And also that drive to understand the

workplace slips very easily into a desire to control the workplace. And this that drive to understand the workplace slips very easily into a desire to control the workplace. And this is where I think, you know, we can look at the history of workers control. I mean, in the UK, there's some fascinating work done by a guy called Goodrich in the 1920s, about the way that, you know, huge parts of the British trade union movement at points in the 1920s had this kind of ideology that other people have described as like Sovietism, right? Where they saw the Russian Revolution, and the thing that got them really excited was the Soviets, right? It was the workers councils that a lot of socialists in Britain found fascinating. Trade unionists, people like Willie Gallagher, the early communist leaders in Britain. And what they really liked was this idea

that workers were having control in their own hands. And so unions like our miners union went ahead and produced these very detailed kind of descriptions of how they could control the workplace from below. And that's a really impressive and interesting demand, right? The idea for workers control is in many ways a really transformative one. Because what you saw in Britain with, for instance, the mines, we ended up nationalizing the mines. But in this nationalization, the very same people who used to manage them kept on managing them, right? There was no real transition in how the social relations within the workplace were organized. It just kind of became notionally under state control. If we're being very generous about what state control means,

somehow mutualized and collectivized. And that, no doubt, is slightly true. That change in ownership was not insignificant. And if I could renationalize large swathes of industry, but not change the management structure tomorrow, I would absolutely do so. But the really transformative demand would be to nationalize these industries and actually put them under the control of the people who work in themselves, right? And that's where you start to get the change from just, let's move around the person who holds the deeds for this particular mine. And you really start to look at how do we revolutionize those social relations themselves? Yeah, no, I think that's a fantastic point. And it's actually something that I want to

come back to a little bit later. But you know, what you talked about, you know, I can't say I've ever, you know, done gig work or any kind of delivery or Uber or anything like that. But I have worked in call centers where, you know, the whole kind of system of distributing calls is managed by a computer, I'm sure by some kind of algorithms. And like, I remember sitting there with my coworkers and we'd wonder like, you know, who would get the call when it came in? How was that decided? Like we had no real idea. And then like, as soon as it came in, like, you know, the clock would be on, you'd, you'd be getting tracked for, you know, every second that you spent on the call, every second that you kept doing work afterward, the amount of time you were on a break, like, you know, it was it was all tracked in this kind of way. And the managers could not only see those numbers, but drop in

on your computer, like at any time and see anything that you were doing, right. And so I think what you say about this kind of algorithmic management, or the use of computers to kind of control the work process is not just something that is happening in gig work, or in Amazon factories, because that is a tech company. This is something that is happening in gig work or in Amazon factories, because that is a tech company. This is something that is being rolled out across the economy. And I think, you know, what you mentioned about service workers is really important because I feel like service workers are kind of denigrated in our economy, right? They're considered like an unskilled kind of worker. So they don't have the same pay or the same protections or the same

kind of social standing as other workers. So it's a lot easier, I feel like, for employers, for companies to kind of enforce those technologies on those workers first, because I feel like people have less opposition to it and the workers themselves generally have less power to push back against it. For sure. I mean, it's really fascinating to look at the way that, so we nerdily call it automated call distribution, the tech in call centers, right? And it's one of the first instances where you see how the conditions of labor can be profoundly changed by this stuff. Because if you track who used to do the work of call centers, I mean, they're invented in financial services, right? This used to be well-paid customer service work that was understood as highly skilled, concentrated in the branches, done by people

who clocked on nine to five and had reasonable working conditions, the invention of that particular core centre organisation of labour takes that quite white collar job and makes it part of, you know, the service proletariat, right? It like really massively changes the way that work is experienced. So with a recomposition of the way that work is organised, with a change in the way that capital has like structured cooperation and structured the use of labor power you have a complete transformation in the lived experience of the worker like both of those things whether you're working as a you know a bank clerk in the 1970s 1980s on the verge of this stuff or a call center worker in the 1990s early noughties you're doing necessarily very similar kinds of work you're achieving the same function for the

firm but that difference in labor organization has completely transformed your experience You're doing necessarily very similar kinds of work. You're achieving the same function for the firm. But that difference in labour organisation has completely transformed your experience and also completely transformed your ability to express yourself politically, right? This has real ramifications at the level of the political because not necessarily always negative implications, but it reconstitutes the basis on which any kind of left socialist project would have to ground itself. Because, you know, is your movement made up of, you know, majority industrial workers with some kind of white collar office workers attached on the side as kind of an addition to a progressive coalition as, you know, you're talking about the communist parties in Europe in the 70s, or the social democratic parties in Europe in the

70s, that's broadly what they are. Or are you dealing with a situation where those automated changes in labour, the way that the recomposition of capital has taken place, gives you a core of call center workers. Well, the political movement emerges out of both of those is going to look very different necessarily and going to have to behave in different ways. It's fascinating to hear you describe that change because I feel like in a lot of cases, people kind of forget that history of how work has changed over time, right? And then so being able to see it, to experience it, to read about how that change has occurred, really helps people to

realize like the effect that technology can have on work itself and how that can be changed and then how that can change the quality of the work, the political relations and social relations around it. There's something else that you mentioned when you talked earlier about the delivery workers that I wanted to pick up on, because one of the things that is often talked about when it comes to this gig work is the idea that it's so much more difficult for these workers to kind of keep in contact and have a space where they can talk to one another, get to know one another and kind of form these bonds that can then be used for organizing later or lead to the organization of structures to push back against these companies. And I feel like what you described with Deliveroo is quite different from what's often described with, say, Uber drivers or something like that, where they're kind of constantly in their cars. And I guess it's often assumed don't really have these ways of communication as much or it's more difficult to develop them. I think they have been developed

now by many Uber drivers. But obviously, you describe these zone centers, and you also talk about the groups and the WhatsApp groups and things like that, that the workers use to keep in touch with one another. So I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about the way that those communication networks were developed between the workers, and then the role that that played in helping to facilitate organizing, you know, when they really just got like pissed off with their jobs and the work that they were having to do and, you know, the way that they were being managed by algorithms. To answer this, we kind of need to do a little bit of a deep dive into the sociology of collective action. I promise not too deep, but there's a guy called Stan Weir,

right, who's an American worker intellectual, who I think was one of the best writers in the socialist movement in America in the 20th century. And Stan Weir talks about the way that his experience of work, so he works as a merchant sailor for a while, he works in a car plant, he works in all sorts of different places. His experience of work has always been structured by these informal work groups, right? That's what he calls them. And basically he says that, you know, in any one place, the people who work together performing one particular function, whether it be they're all doing the same job on deck on a ship, or they're all doing the same part of an assembly line or the consequent parts of assembly lines in a car factory. They all have this kind of like informal relationship amongst themselves because they have to cooperate for the labour process to work. And so really, when you look at a workplace on a sociological level, you're looking at lots of little micro units of informal work groups with people who work together.

Now, Marx talks about cooperation a lot in Capital. It's probably one of my favorite chapters in Capital. And I think cooperation is really what marks out the capitalist labor process, right? What really marks out capitalism is different from previous forms of manufacture, for instance, is the fact that it brings together the collective power of masses. Marx says when that happens, then the animal spirits are unleashed, right? It's when we're putting lots of people together to work on complicated processes together, that cooperation is a huge part of what defines the productive capacity of capitalism, right? Like what is capitalism, but really our own collective

ability to cooperate in service of some form of dead labor, in service of a form of value that is kind of alien to us. So we all cooperate together. That's really important. But that cooperation does not only produce a huge amount of value for the people who own capital, those relationships of cooperation produce solidarity. So the fact that when we are working in the workplace, we work with a group of other people, that is what makes us productive, but it's also what makes us potentially obstructive to capital, because you have those relationships with your co-workers that are ones of solidarity that can be turned against your bosses, right? So these informal work groups, my contention would be, emerge in every workplace. Like there's basically not a way to stop human beings socializing together. We are incredibly

social animals. That's basically what we do. It's our essence, if there is one, right? So that kind of creation of informal work groups operates differently depending on the technical context. So yes, like we were saying, if you're in a call center, it'll be the people who are sat around you, right? Or the people who you've made friends with in the call center. Now, it does look different in a platform capitalist context, right? When you're working for Uber, when you're working for delivery, it looks different. However, it's look different in a platform capitalist context, right? When you're working for Uber, when you're working for Deliveroo, it looks different. However, it's not that it doesn't happen. It's not that there is no cooperative relationship.

So from the outside, when I was observing this stuff before I went and got a job in Deliveroo, I was really amazed. There was these strikes that broke out in 2016, I think it was. And I was just looking at them like, wow, how are those workers organized? How do they know each other? They must all just be working on their phones, never seeing each other. How could they possibly organize collective action if they're also atomized and individualized? As soon as I got the job, I was like, you're an idiot, Callum. They aren't atomized or individualized at all. It's really obvious, right? So Romano Acquati,

who is an Italian workerist, talked about the invisible organization within the plant, right? You have the over-organization, which he was talking about Fiat. And the over-organization was the trade unions that had a formal bargaining relationship with Fiat. There was also the invisible organization, which was the actual organization produced by workers themselves and the interrelation of their informal work groups. Now, in a context like, I'll speak about to the group, because it's the one I know the most about, that's produced by all the common points of contact you have, right? So when you're waiting in those zone centers, obviously immediately huge amounts of socialization occurring there. But it also happened when you ride past someone, you'll say hello. And 90, 95% of the time they'll say hello back. Or I once got in an argument, I tell the story in the book

again, with another road user where they just started shouting at me because I jumped some lights and I started shouting back. Another delivery rider pulls right up and says, yeah, are you okay? Is everything okay here? And now I'm like, yeah, no, it's fine, mate. Cheers. And that relationship immediately is one of solidarity. When you're picking up food from restaurants, again, exactly the same thing. If you're in the UK, if you work for Uber Eats, you do a lot of deliveries from McDonald's. Those McDonald's, again, kind of operate as a zone center. So from those points of in-person connection, people start to build those relationships of solidarity. And on top of that structure of in-person conversations, you build these networks of chats, right? Inevitably,

it occurs. So actually, you know, the real structure of these informal work groups is the WhatsApp group, or the Telegram group, or whatever messenger app people choose to use. And those communities, those chat groups, are then what becomes used when people want to make the jump into collective action. So when we ended up going on strike over wages, we tried to set up a union branch by this point, and we had a nascent union structure. And there was a few of us who were trying to do trade unionism 101. In the end, the strike was called by a WhatsApp group for Brazilian moped riders who decided, I'm pissed off. We're not doing this anymore. They start forwarding this message to a load of other WhatsApp groups. And suddenly there's a strike on and the trade union, we're looking at each other like,

what the fuck? We didn't call that. But okay, great. Fantastic. Let's go with it. So those informal work groups as structured both through in-person connections and those virtual connections are the heart and soul of how stuff emerges here. And, you know, I think the really important thing to understand is those are produced no matter what the workplace is. There's a guy called Maffie who does some studies on Uber drivers, and he does some very clever stats stuff where he basically looks at if people are members of Uber driver Facebook and WhatsApp groups, what is their inclination towards forming a union, right, compared to those drivers who aren't in those groups. And the drivers who are in those groups have a much much higher compulsion towards like yes i want a union yes i want to organize yes i want to fight for our collective rights

so those structures are really important and workers participating them is the basis of how you organize it and even though it looks very different from how you would have you know it's not a group of people hanging out in a canteen anymore, but it plays exactly the same functional role. And those kind of digital infrastructures are really important. Now they bring with them their own dynamics. You know, absolutely, you know, is mediation through kind of WhatsApp chats going to change the way you organize? Yeah, it really is. And not always in positive ways. But I think you can see this, you know, not just in the platform capitalist context, but also you read any of Eric Blanc's stuff on the US teacher strikes, right? Red read any of Eric Blanc's stuff on the

US teacher strikes, right? Red State Revolt, fantastic book. He basically talks about the way that Facebook groups are crucial to how they organize wildcat strikes amongst teachers, right? So for labor activists today, for people who are interested in thinking about the workplace, for Marxists who want to kind of understand how we might build a workers' movement in, you know, the not particularly favorable conditions of late capitalism, understanding how informal work groups become structured through kind of this multi person, many to many communication environment is really important. Because actually, the social behaviors of people, we all chat online all the time, right, particularly after this pandemic, like we don't do in person socialization at the moment, or in the UK, anyway,

I've been in lockdown for like three months, I'm getting serious cabin fever here. But that kind of communication through those group chats is going to be where we find a lot of the roots for successful labour organisation in the future. That's such a good description of, you know, the importance of these communication networks. And even though we talk about the issues with Facebook and with WhatsApp and with these social networks, it's also fascinating to then hear the way that people are able to use them to their advantage as well, right? I wanted to pick up on, you know, something that you started to talk about there, which was, you know, obviously the organizing that was taking place among these Deliveroo riders that you describe in the book, right, that you participated in, that you, you know, help move forward, right, that you that you work with.

So how did, I guess, the organizing move forward among these Deliveroo drivers? What were the things that were driving them? And I guess, what were the kind of actions that they took to bring their demands to Deliveroo, to these app companies, to try to improve their working conditions, to try to improve things for themselves, I guess? When I got my job at Deliveroo, I was working in the city of Brighton on the south coast of England. It's got a large student population. It was just at the start of a massive wave of recruitment. So the story of how I ended up working there is quite funny. I'd written an article for a publication called Navarro Media, which is like a left-wing alternative news

thing in the UK, about these strikes that happened in London. And as part of that, I'd done a lot of Googling of Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Now, obviously, the algorithm noticed this. And when I was on Facebook in my office job, really, really bored out of my mind, I kept on getting adverts, come work for Deliveroo, come work for Deliveroo. And I think the algorithm played them there. But I did end up going and working for the company because I was doing quite a lot of student debt. I love cycling. I was like, yeah, that sounds like it'd be fun. And maybe I'll understand the phenomena I was looking at a bit more. Maybe I'll have a better understanding of how those strikes actually came to happen. And maybe I'll be able to get some insights that might be of use to myself and other people who are engaged in the workers movement.

So I went and I started the job along with many other people because they're running this big advertising campaign to bring in new workers. And as they recruited more and more of us, basically, we played at pure piece rate, right? So only paid wages for the deliveries. We did no hourly rate at all. And so if you think about it, there's 100 deliveries to be done. There's 25 riders. That means you do four deliveries an hour. That means you're making decent money. Say there's suddenly 50 riders. Well, then you're doing two deliveries an hour. Then the money's not as good, but maybe you can get by on it. Then say there's 100 riders. Well, you're doing one delivery an hour, right? And that really is not good and you can't live on it. Basically, that describes what happens to a lot of the delivery riders in Brighton.

So as more and more of us started, the amount of time you have to spend waiting went up and up and up. It was just getting into the really cold part of winter. It's a seaside town. It has a pretty chilly wind coming off the sea. And so we ended up just spending loads of time waiting and our wages were declining and declining and declining. And in this context, like I've talked about, you have the zone centres. We started talking about self-organisation and it kind of went from there. So we talked about sector union, the IWGB, Independent Workers of Great Britain was the union we ended up plumping for because it had the most experience in the sector. It led some courier struggles in London. It'd been quite visibly involved in some of those struggles that we'd

seen kick off just a few months beforehand with Uber Eats and delivery workers. And basically, we went to them, we're like, look, want to set up a union? It was myself and about 20 other cyclists. We started trying to set it up. We didn't have a great outreach to the moped riders. There's an interesting question here about the social composition of the workforce and division between cyclists and moped riders and the way that these kind of platforms scoop up the whole of urban surplus labor population and that's actually made up of quite a few different fractions of people with quite different life experiences and so on so forth but anyway we basically set up this nascent union branch then yes as i said before the brazil arouse was the

name of the whatsapp chat the brazilian moped riders who want to go on strike just told us we were going on strike. And so there we were. The really interesting thing for me about that campaign was it was a campaign that starts off incredibly strongly. You know, you're talking hundreds of riders on strike, the ability to deliver food completely shut down. There was no warning given because, you know, actually the really fascinating thing here is because you're not an employee, you're exempt from all trade union law, right? So in the UK, we have some of the most restrictive trade union law in the world because Margaret Thatcher was evil and brought in a huge amount of restrictive legislation. But that was all about regulating the employment relationship. It was all about making it harder for an employee

to go on strike. It said absolutely nothing about self-employed workers refusing to do work, right? So in their redefinition of us as self-employed, they actually got rid of their own legal protections against wildcat strike action. So we realized we had that weapon. We used it really strongly, shut down deliveries in the city. That meant that their service crashes, they can't make any deliveries. They're having to refund the restaurants for the food that's going to waste. They're having to refund the customers for the deliveries that don't... You're causing a lot of damage. There's a lot of leverage there. And then as a trade union, we tried to engage in a more sustained struggle to build something

on top of that. And over the next couple of months, we had demonstrations and so on and so forth. It wasn't ultimately completely effective. We had three demands, which was we wanted to go from £4 a drop to £5 a drop, so to increase wages. We wanted a hiring freeze, basically to make sure that there was no more workers coming in so that we could not constantly be fighting for this pool of orders with more and more people. And we wanted no victimizations for trade unionists involved in the struggle. We won two of those, the hiring freeze and the no victimizations,

but we didn't win the £5 an hour demand. So pretty successful, but not everything we wanted. Well, certainly not everything I wanted, but then I want a lot more than those three quite limited demands. And that, I think, was fascinating for me because it revealed one of the dynamics here, which is that with these kind of self-organized networks, workers have the capacity to mobilize into very effective strike action very, very quickly. They don't have to give any notice and they can bring the app crashing down, right? So they can participate in that and have a huge amount of leverage very fast. And that leads to kind of behavior that, you know, you were talking about the Luddites the other so they can participate in that and have a huge amount of leverage very fast. And that leads to kind of behavior that, you know, you're talking about the Luddites the other week,

you said, well, E.P. Thompson talking about people in England in the 16th, 17th hundreds, I talked about bargaining by riots methodology, where you don't actually have like a formal negotiation, you just fuck shit up and wait for them to make it better. And that's kind of what we ended up doing, because delivery would never recognize a union, they still don't recognize unions. So you couldn't have a collective bargaining relationship so all you do is you'd fuck up the service and then be like all right now go on make it better and that's kind of what they do they introduce boost payments so you have temporary increases in wages so it's kind of much more of a guerrilla warfare if you imagine a trade union with a strong base employees in a you know a relatively static workplace fighting a long campaign that's's kind of your traditional

warfare. This was much more hit and run stuff. And that's one of the kind of recurring problems here is that actually there's a lot of self-organization that goes on in this sector. There's a lot of very militant action that goes on. Often it goes completely unknown, right? It happens and no one will ever hear about it again. There was a period where I was really embedded in these movements, which sadly I'm not as much anymore. But I was finding out about strikes that were just happening all the time. You'd be like, oh, Bristol's on strike. This zone in London's on strike.

There's strikes happening constantly down to like very, very small ones. I heard about a strike of Uber Eats workers in kind of a remote part of West London where there were eight of them who worked for Uber Eats in their zone. So they knew if all eight of them stopped working, there was absolutely no way Uber was going to function and that McDonald's was just not going to do any deliveries. So there is this kind of ongoing constant struggle, but it really struggles to find a coherent organizational form for the long term. And that means that what you get is, like I said, this guerrilla warfare, but the escalation politically can be very difficult. So you can see occasionally, particularly when kind of militants with a political inclination are involved, you can articulate it politically.

You can link up lots of different instances and say, you know, let's go on strike together. So there was probably one of the high points of our involvement in it was with the fast food shutdown, right, where we brought together the first national Uber Eats strike. We had thousands of Uber Eats workers all over the country out on strike at the same time as Wetherspoon's workers, at the same time as TGI Friday's workers, and at the same time as McDonald's workers. And we brought all of them together. And then there was the Labour Party under its previous more radical leadership, John McDonald, the shadow chancellor, giving a speech supporting them in Leicester Square in London. So you can articulate it politically when you're really engaged, but it's often not forming these long-term organizational forms. Our trade union kind of vanished, right? Because actually, the workers were like, I don't really need it. I can just have my strike network through my WhatsApp.

And also, I think this is really important to understand, a lot of the people who work for these platforms don't necessarily have the legal right to work, right? They're often working kind of on the edges of the legal labor market in these kind of grey zones or in outright ways in which the state decries they shouldn't be. And that basically means that they're very reluctant in some cases to take on a visual organised form. Organisation can mean that you are engageable by the state, right? You're engageable by the police, you are visibleised to people who you don't want to be visible to. So there's a lot of different tensions there, a lot of difficulties, sometimes language problems as well. But basically, what we've not seen is the emergence of long term organized movements apart from where they have

legal cases to kind of grab onto. That's kind of what happened with this Uber case in the UK, right? UPHD is a branch of the IWGB, which mostly works with Uber drivers. They originally brought this case, or they originally were engaged with this case, and they've built a really strong union organization off the back of kind of working with this legal case. But it's not necessarily, you know, where that legal avenue isn't available, people don't necessarily build structures. I think the legal avenue is also really difficult for workers because it's not our terrain, right? It's not our ground. It's very much theirs, where Uber have the capacity to do a Prop 22 and completely change the law, or they can do what they do in France and lobby for a third category there,

or they can just mess with things. And it's never going to be as solid as it sounds. A legal victory sounds in your head really solid, fantastic. We've won this status. We've won this category. This has categorically improved the power and position of workers in the workplace. It's not necessarily that simple. Any victories that you haven't earned by displaying the power at the grassroots are likely to be rolled back very quickly. So I think for me, that process or that difficulty of how do you turn these flashes in the pan into long-term sustained organizing, that's really the horizon of where we're at now.

Because Uber Eats and Deliveroo and the rest of them can't stop those wildcat actions from happening. They're part of the labor process. They've almost been designed in there. It's very antagonistic, low-wage labor where people are really pissed off and they have the capacity to do something about it. Those strikes will take place. That militancy will emerge. The question for us has to be, how do we convert it into something? And how do we convert it into a movement where it can have really long-lasting impacts, not only on how the labor market is regulated, not only on that very limited kind of economistic horizon, but on a political horizon? How do we organize societies that the interests of workers are not just an afterthought of profit, but instead the front and center? What you're saying there about the political horizons really resonates with the final question that I wanted to ask you.

Because in the book, you talk about if we're thinking about food delivery, you know, kind of the vision of these companies is to use automation and the data that they're gathering to kind of use delivery drones or, you know, these automated kind of sidewalk delivery things instead of human drivers and to use these ghost kitchens to, you know, create the food that ultimately gets delivered. And so to create this whole kind of network around its app that, you know, gives human workers even less power if they're even part of that kind of work process at all, right? But I think what you're talking about there, and one of the questions that you kind of bring up in your book is what is kind of the response to that? What is the vision for a different kind of food network, I guess, that is more aligned

to, I guess, the world that we would want to see or something that actually serves the good of the public instead of just these massive exploitative corporations, right? And so near the end of your book, you ask whether the goal should be to pursue kind of platform cooperatives or worker control of these kind of organizations, I guess. And so that's what I kind of wanted to end with. What do you think is kind of the goal that we should be looking at when we think about the future of these organizations in this kind of sector? This chapter has kind of become my favorite part of the book, because whenever I get a negative review, it's off somebody who's like, well, this is just unrealistic and mental. And that has really endeared it to me. So I kind of end with, you know, Mark says you

shouldn't, what is it? Stews for the cookshops of the future, recipes for the cookshops of the future. That's it. I break his rules here in a very literal sense by talking about the cookshops of the future. But I think it's important to have that kind of horizon and that kind of vision. Because for me, you know, what is a service like this? Functionally, what's it do? What's its core concrete nature? Well, it's really care. What these platforms do is they largely provide people who are exhausted from work, hungover, too depressed to go out to the shops, caring for young children. It provides them with food quickly to their door. Takeaway tends not to be, for most people people in a non-pandemic

context used really for entertainment. If you really want entertainment, you'll go out and you'll get some food or something, right? But it's really used in that context for like, making yourself feel a bit better. And often the way that I view Deliveroo and Uber Eats operating in the pre-pandemic delivery market was that they kind of operated as a way of selling someone a dream that actually, no, you're not depressed. You're enjoying a restaurant experience on your pandemic delivery market was that they kind of operated as a way of selling someone a dream that actually, no, you're not depressed. You're enjoying a restaurant experience on your sofa. And you're choosing to do that because that's how you want to enjoy it, not because you're too depressed to go out. And actually, the reality on the doorstep was just that. You

deliver to people who are having a tough time or hungover or whatever. You could just see that that was the situation they were in. And the times when I used to use takeaway, it would be exactly that situation where you feel shit and you don't want to go out, right? You order it in or you've come back late at night and there's nothing left in the fridge and you cannot face the idea of having to have dry pasta or whatever it is. So it's a care service. It's only available at the moment, however, to people with that spare room in their incomes, right? It's really for a certain kind of well-paid worker, middle-class person who can afford to do that. So for me, the thing I find fascinating is we live in a society where we have a care crisis. We have a rapidly aging population. The time I was writing the book, my grandparents, bless them, were still alive. And my grandparents

were just not being provided with the social care they really needed. My mom was doing everything she could. There were social services trying to do things that good, but you know, they're very old people and they need a lot of help. Right. And I heard from some comrades in France about a service where in France, if you pay La Poste a little bit more, the postman stays around and has like a cup of tea with your nan. Right. And that kind of service is, is something that is going to be more and more necessary as we move into having a more aging population, which has much higher care needs. And so for me, I think about this stuff and, you know, it's a care service that should be prioritized for people who need care. The actual use value here is to provide hot food to people who need it.

And for people who need that delivery option, because they maybe can't go out. So that's going to be the elderly. That's going to be new parents. That's going to be people who are struggling with mental health problems. A whole variety of reasons. People have broken their legs, for God's sake, you know, all that kind of thing, right? So this should be, in my head anyway, and my vision here is that this delivery service is just one modality, one way of delivering what should be a universal food service. And we should have a horizon here. There's some fantastic research from UCL that I'd recommend people look at, but we should be looking at the decommodification of core functions of our society through a universal a universal basic services program that to me seems much more inclined towards decommodification

towards like the socialization of production than a universal basic income for instance right so i'm really interested in rethinking it that way thinking could we you know take these data centers into collective ownership could we start running things so that delivery workers have a real say in what they do and then from there you kind of spin out into like, what would it actually look like in concrete? Well, these dark kitchens at the moment, just like sling out pizzas all over East London, they could become, you know, community hubs where you're doing collective food provision, and you're using your procurement power, your power and what you buy to make sure that you're supporting sustainable agriculture. And you're producing food that actually, you know, you don't ask people to work out what's nutritious. You're like, well,

we're just going to make good food. We're going to make it available for free. We're going to provide it to everyone. Then you're immediately providing a kind of basic guaranteed safety net that no one will starve to death, right? And in the UK today, people are starving to death in one of the most developed societies in history. So for me, that vision of using food as a care service, providing it universally on a decommodified basis, in delivery forms to people who can't leave the house, in canteen forms to people who can, and using that as a way of rebuilding our society. I mean, after this pandemic, God, our social connections are so shot. Like, I don't know how we are really going to recover from this in any way but this kind

of decommodified care, because we've just shredded all of the social connections that really make up what it means to be human. I mean, we're talking about cooperative relations and informal work groups. God, we need to rebuild and invest in rebuilding communities and societies so that we're actually not just horribly alienated, not knowing anyone around us in cities, but are living in like real human communities that actually feel good to live in. And for me, you know, that's the vision of delivery that I have in my head is like a people's delivery, one where we prioritize use value over profit. And, you know, it's a time I wrote it, I was kind of thinking maybe I could

write like a maximal plan for Corbynism, maybe like an absolute maximum of what we could do. Like if we just went hell for leather and everything went perfectly, what could Corbynism, maybe like an absolute maximum of what we could do. Like if we just went hell for leather and everything went perfectly, what could Corbynism do? And, you know, maybe that's a more distant dream now, but it's, to me, it's still my favorite part of the book. And it, it makes me a bit emotional every time I talk about it, because it's like that vision of what if we took all the work we do, everything we spend our lives doing and optimize it for human wellbeing, rather than just fucking making money for this guy called Will Shsu who happens to own the platform and just be immensely rich, right? How could we reimagine that repurposing? And that's not just an experiment that's worth doing with Deliveroo or the platform capitalism or whatever. It's a really powerful process of reimagining that I think has huge

value for workers who participate in it wherever they work. So there's the Lucas plan, which is a famous example of this, right? Lucas Aerospace workers in the UK who were making jet engines, often for fighter planes. And basically said, what if we made like boilers and little attachments for boilers that would keep old people's homes warmer in winter?

And that kind of re-imagining is a really powerful one because you're saying, what if we organize society like actually humanely, actually for the interest of the people who live in it, the people who do the work. And for me, it's kind of clarion called the book. And, you know,

despite the negative reviews, I'm very, very, very happy it's in there. Let's try and imagine what that world would be like. And imagine a future that's premised on using this technology for good and using these productive forces to actually amplify the quality of human life. I couldn't agree more. You know, if that's not obvious. Obviously, one of the goals of this podcast is to think about how these technologies can be utilized in a way that actually serves, you know, the collective good instead of just the profits of these massive corporations. And I think what you described there, and obviously what you described to the book is how that can be done, like one avenue toward which that can be done to kind of

heal these major problems in our society and how that can be facilitated by similar technologies to what right now are just creating even further exploitation and making people's lives worse, right? So I think that's a fantastic vision. And obviously I'd encourage anyone to pick up your book and read more about it.

Callum, thank you so much for taking the time to chat and to sharing your experience and your knowledge with us. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much, mate. time to chat and to sharing your experience and your knowledge with us. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much, Matt. It's been lovely to talk. Callum Kant is the author of Writing for Deliveroo, Resistance in the New Economy, and the head of communications at Momentum. You can find information on how to buy the book in the show notes.

And you can also follow Callum on Twitter at at CallumKant1. You can follow me at at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at at TechW't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to find out more about the other shows in the network, you can go to harbingermedianetwork.com. If you want to support the work that I put into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.